Ep.36 Exit
Badgerlands on fire in the early morning sun.
It’s weeks since I’ve swum in the loch, the weather has been wild and the water choppy and uninviting, I seem to have lost my appetite for it. The grey slide towards Highland winter echos my slide towards redundancy but I’ve promised myself this slow motion tumble will stop as soon as I stop work, I promise myself on the day after I leave the BBC, regardless of the weather, I will climb into my wetsuit and wander back down the track to the shore and swim. Re-set.
Two days before I leave the BBC a card arrives and a box. ‘For Monday’ the card says on the back so I obediently, immediately, pushed it away, relieved. The box remains taped and closed. I’m not good with this stuff. I’m less than not good, I’m dreadful.
After 15 years of working with me my team are familiar with my pathological aversion to fuss. Back in May they sent me a card and extremely generous gift voucher for a local gallery for my 50th birthday. ‘We know you will say we shouldn’t but we are anyway!’ I was told. I often think I must seem incredibly ungrateful. I’m not. It’s the opposite problem. I find I’m all too easily overwhelmed by such gestures, they make me cry and this year, in the wake of all that has happened, tears are even closer to the surface, my skin is thinner, I’m too fragile. I’m dreading my final day at work.
In yet another bizarre deference to Covid my final day takes the form of 3 zoom meetings. I wrap up 25 years at the BBC sitting in the spare room swapping memories and stories with the many colleagues who have become my good friends. It feels ever so slightly like attending my own wake. People say lovely, generous, heartfelt things which make me squirm with embarrassment. I’m deeply suspicious I tell them, people always say nice things after someone dies, always sing their praises, this has the distinct whiff of being buried alive. 'Tomorrow you’ll be slagging me off something rotten', I laugh at them, 'you’ll be having an o-bitch-uary!'
I talk too much, soak up as much time as possible in a bid to stop them saying how much I’ll be missed. Finally, at the end of the third zoom meeting, we say a last farewell and each person leaves the meeting one by one switching off their camera until it’s just me and Heather, my line manager, who holds me with her gaze as I finally give in to all the tears I’ve been trying to keep in check. I wish I could give her a hug. She’s been utterly amazing these past few months, unwavering in her support, I couldn’t have asked for more or better. I tell her I’ll miss her and she assures me she’ll be back on the phone sharing all the gossip within days. Then, with a wave, we click and leave.
The predominant feeling is just of silence, like a roaring sound that's suddenly switched off, curious that I didn't hear it until it was gone. I delete the final few files, write an out of office for my email then drive to the BBC building in Inverness. Red and white warning tape marks a ‘do not cross’ line 2 meters away from the empty reception desk, arrows on the floor indicate a one way system, guiding you safely through a building locked down and curiously quiet. I resist the temptation to visit my old office or say a final farewell to the folk up in the newsroom, there are too many ghosts here for me to linger long. Instead I place the laptop and my phone along with a note of thanks on reception, put two large boxes of chocolates in the kitchen area and walk away.
The next morning, regardless of the lack of work or routine or anything ahead, I’m up at 7 to get B awake and out the door for school. It’s a glorious day. The sun pours down over the hills opposite dazzling as it bounces off the surface of the loch. I pull on my wetsuit and can’t help smiling at B’s appalled look as I head out the door alongside her – she’s picturing the life scarring utter embarrassment of the possibility of my wet-suited form being seen by any of the other pupils on her school bus. ‘I have to run, I’ll be late’ she shouts then shoots off down the track, desperate to meet the bus before I appear. I don’t need an excuse, it’s a delight to dawdle. Badgerlands above me is on fire in the early sun, I pause and take a photograph, loving the fact that I don’t have to rush back to the spare room for the Tuesday morning team brief. I hold the idea in my mind of the machinery of the BBC, all those cogs and wheels, still turning, still whirring without me there pedalling. It’s such an all consuming line of work, disproportionately so, you over commit. It took me a long time to realise that in spite of all the passion and humanity packed into its walls the BBC, like most organisations, doesn’t really care, it can’t afford to. It’s a place bursting with people who want to matter, but if the walls came tumbling down every time someone who mattered left the building there would be no building. And we do all matter, just not in the way we might want or think we need.
As I slip my shoes off down by the shore and throw my towel on a rock, I allow myself the small indulgence of lingering on my team member Phil’s comment yesterday, ‘I know you always say everyone is replaceable, but you’re not, no one will ever replace you, no one will bring what you bring’ and I glow in the warmth of his words as I turn and wade into the freezing water to swim.